Disney’s Hercules, or How Everything I Know I Learnt from Animation

Continuing my love for animation (okay… some may call it obsession, I call it a “calling”) I present to you the most recent entry for the Everything I Know I Learnt from Animation series. Joining us today is an adorably hunky Greek Hero (even if the Disney name is actually Roman… but really, who here cares about such petty details. And also, how much would it have sucked to market a movie called Herakles?): Hercules!

Hercules(1997)
Dir. John Musker & Ron Clements

Top 10 Things I learnt from Disney’s Hercules:

1. Calling men WonderBoy does wonders to get them interested.
2. Girls are better are zinging (and singing!) than men (“So, do they give you a name along with all those rippling pectorals?”)
3. I can go the distance. Now if only I knew exactly what that meant… or if I could frame it in a non-sports-oriented way…
4. Villains are/should be flaming! (More on that here)
5. Everything is cuter in baby-form. See Hercules and Pegasus.
6. Merchandising, celebrity culture and even Gospel singing (!) date back to Greek times. (“You give me a word, any word and I show you that the root of that word is Greek!”)
7. D.I.D. stands for Damsel in distress. And not, of course Direct Inward Dialing.
8. The easiest way to get friends, fans and fame is to buff up and sound like Tate Donovan. Wait… no, was I supposed to get something else out of that?
9. The way to get your characters to look cool is to hire Gerald Scarfe (yeah, that guy who did the animation bits for the Pink Floyd movie The Wall!)
10. Disney is not to be taken as a reliable source when it comes to Greek Mythology (or Chinese folk stories, or Shakespeare, or Native American history, or Victor Hugo novels…